Fort Pickens, 1861: How a Union Lieutenant Held Pensacola's Key Fort as War Began

Behind the white sand beaches and sea oats of Santa Rosa Island, Florida, stands Fort Pickens, one of the largest brick forts ever built in the United States. Months before the firing on Fort Sumter, secessionist forces at nearby Pensacola tried to take it from the U.S. Army without bloodshed — and failed. Fort Pickens, with Fort McRee, Fort Barrancas and the Advanced Redoubt, is now part of Gulf Islands National Seashore.

Guarding Pensacola Bay

Pensacola has one of the best deep-water harbors on the Gulf Coast, and the Spanish, French, English and Americans all saw its entrance as the key to defending Florida's panhandle. After Spain ceded Florida in 1819, the U.S. Navy put a navy yard there, and from 1829 the Americans built four forts to protect it from foreign attack:

The forts were built by enslaved laborers. The idea was to look so formidable that no enemy would attack — and no foreign power ever did. The Civil War was another matter.

Pensacola's harbor defenses, 1861. National Park Service.

Secession

When Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 election, many white Southerners reacted with fear and anger. Lincoln had said only that slavery should not spread to the territories, but few believed he would stop there. South Carolina seceded in December 1860; within six weeks, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas followed, arguing that states that had joined the Union freely could leave it too.

Pensacola's safe harbor and navy yard — docks, supplies, shipbuilding — and its four forts would be a prize for either side.

Slemmer's choice

Lieutenant Adam J. Slemmer, at Fort Barrancas, knew his 51 men could not hold four forts. On January 10, 1861 — the day Florida seceded — he moved them all into Fort Pickens, which he judged the key to the harbor. As he recalled, he and Commodore Armstrong, commanding the navy yard, agreed they could hold only one fort, and it should be Pickens, since it commanded the harbor, the other forts and the navy yard.

Two days later, his men watched secessionist troops occupy the other forts and take down the U.S. flags.

The demand to surrender

Major William Chase of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had lived in Pensacola since 1829, running businesses there, often with enslaved labor, and had helped plan and build the Pensacola forts. In 1861 he took command of Florida's secessionist troops, which seized the navy yard without a fight and found the other forts already abandoned.

On January 15, 1861, Chase came to Fort Pickens in person. Lieutenant Jeremiah H. Gilman, who was there, wrote the exchange down twenty-five years later:

• Chase asked to talk inside; Slemmer refused — Chase, who had built the fort, would learn nothing new, but it would be improper.
• Chase presented a demand from the governor of Florida and claimed eight to nine hundred men, enough to take the fort by storm. Asked how many he would lose, he conceded it could be many.
• Chase warned that Florida would not let the fort be held, that he could bring thousands more, and that refusal meant civil war.
• Slemmer promised an answer the next morning. It was no: he would hold the fort until overwhelmed or until lawful authorities could receive it — and if blood was shed, the secessionists would be the aggressors.

Chase reported to Jefferson Davis that taking the fort would mean scaling the walls — certain bloodshed and war — and left things as they were. On January 28, a truce was agreed: the South would not attack, and the fort would not be reinforced.

Fort Pickens from the air, about 1970. Gulf Islands National Seashore.

Fort Pickens. Gulf Islands National Seashore.

Waiting — then war

By March both Fort Sumter and Fort Pickens needed supplies. Lincoln had pledged to hold federal property in the seceded states; withdrawing would mean recognizing the Confederacy, but resupplying risked war.

• Union ships with supplies and troops from Fort Monroe, Virginia, reached Pickens but, under the truce, didn't land. For 10 weeks they lay at anchor while Slemmer's men stayed on full alert.
• The Confederates had planned a surprise attack, delayed by bad weather until April 12 — the day South Carolina opened fire on Fort Sumter. The war had begun.

Stephen R. Mallory, Florida's senator and soon the Confederate secretary of the navy, warned the North in February 1861 that spilled blood would leave a stain "the rains of a century" could not wash away — yet also judged Fort Pickens "not worth one drop of blood" to the South.

Fighting at Pensacola

By summer 1861, Colonel Harvey Brown held Fort Pickens with a thousand or more men, and the U.S. Navy blockaded the harbor. Across the bay, General Braxton Bragg's Confederates — several thousand, green but eager — held a line four miles long, from Fort McRee to Fort Barrancas and the navy yard.

• September 13, 1861: 100 Union sailors and marines crossed the bay and burned the Confederate ship Judah at the navy yard — the first fighting there.
• October 9: more than 1,000 Confederates landed four miles east of Fort Pickens before dawn and burned a Union camp, but some got lost among the dunes; fearing Union gunboats, they fell back to their boats under a Union counterattack. The Battle of Santa Rosa Island was one of the first significant land battles of the war in Florida.
• November 22–23: calling the raid a "gross insult to the flag," Brown opened a two-day bombardment from the fort and ships. About 5,000 Union and 1,000 Confederate projectiles were fired; dead fish floated up in the bay and windows broke seven miles away in Pensacola. Yet little changed: Fort Pickens lost one man and two guns (one burst from overuse), Confederate losses were light — though Fort McRee was heavily damaged.

Fort Barrancas from the air, about 1983. Gulf Islands National Seashore.

Fort Barrancas. Gulf Islands National Seashore.

Union Pensacola

The Union took the harbor in May 1862 — not by battle, but because the Confederates pulled out more than 10,000 soldiers from the region beginning in February. Union forces occupied the navy yard and forts and held Pensacola for the rest of the war, using the forts as a base for raids into Florida and Alabama and as a prison for military and political prisoners.

The forts had been built on the reasoning Lieutenant Henry W. Halleck set out in 1843: once built, forts cost little to keep, drew no citizens from useful work, posed no threat to liberty, and had immense power to preserve peace and stop an invader.

Sources

Based on "Fort Pickens and the Outbreak of the Civil War," a Teaching with Historic Places lesson by Ann Marie Folker, Park Ranger at Gulf Islands National Seashore, edited by Fay Metcalf and the TwHP staff, National Park Service, drawing on the National Register files for Fort Pickens and the Fort Barrancas Historic District, E. C. Bearss's Historic Structure Report, Fort Pickens (1983), and J. H. Gilman, "With Slemmer in Pensacola Harbor," in Battles and Leaders of the Civil War (1887); a work of the United States government in the public domain. The lesson's questions and activities are left out, and its opening photograph, credited to an outside photographer, is not reproduced.